Today, there is a strong effort to build mobile and handheld computing devices that easily allow users to view documents, email, video presentations, and other forms of content. To achieve this convergence, engineers and scientists have developed systems including the systems described in the above-referenced U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/703,502 entitled, Systems and Methods for Digital Document Processing, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference. As described therein, digital content, whether a document, audio visual presentation, or some other type of content, is processed by a software system operating on a handheld device, mobile device, or some other platform, and translated into a uniform internal representation that can be processed and manipulated by the software system so that a display of different types of content can be generated by the system and presented on the screen display of the respective device.
These systems, as well as other handheld and mobile computing systems such as the Palm Pilot, Compaq Ipaq, and mobile phones, are therefore capable of providing a display of content to a user. However, these handheld and mobile systems are typically limited to simple input devices such as small and limited keyboards, commonly the keyboards present on a cellular phone, or by small touch screen systems, such as the touch screens provided with the Palm computing device. Therefore, although these systems are capable of presenting content to a user wherein the content can be quite complex, these systems have limited capacity to allow a user to manipulate the display of that content, such as by paging through the different pages of a document or selecting different portions of a document. Therefore, although these handheld and portable systems may be quite useful, there are limitations to their use based in part on the user interfaces available for supporting the manipulation and viewing of the content presented on these devices.
Consequently, there is a need in the art for systems and methods that provide improved user interface tools that make it more facile to manipulate and view content presented by a handheld or portable device.
Additionally, there is a need in the art for user interface tools that allow for the manipulation of content, when that content is separated from its native application program.